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Automation of machine fault diagnosis is approached using an expert network which captures human expertise in symbolic form and is refined using historical performance data. A development environment for expert networks which draws from knowledge implicit in historical data to build and refine the expert network dynamically is presented. The testbed for the design of this development environment is fault diagnosis for gas chromatographs used in detecting contaminants in soil samples. The expert knowledge capture procedure for this testbed problem and its implementation in the G2 commercial expert system package were presented at AeroSense '95. The development environment for the fault diagnosis system includes several data-assisted methods which complement the expert knowledge embedded in the expert network. The first module presented, NetMaker, automatically constructs the network in G2 from an ASCH knowledge table file. NetMedic, the second module, is a data- assisted method which is used to confirm, refine, and augment expert knowledge in order to make the knowledge table more accurate. These tools form the foundation of the expert network development environment. The basis of the expert networks developed for machine fault diagnosis is the knowledge table, a matrix of signature symptoms and machine faults related by linguistic qualifiers. The knowledge table undergoes frequent revision due to refinements from the experts, data-enhanced knowledge from NetMedic, and improved symptom extraction algorithms. NetMaker satisfies the need to easily revise the knowledge tables and incorporate them seamlessly into the G2 expert network environment. NetMedic is used to improve machine fault diagnosis by suggesting alterations to the physical architecture of the knowledge table and the associated expert network, including several non-trainable parameters. This utility discovers relationships in the sample data using statistics from historical data. The experts may then incorporate new relationships in the expert knowledge as well as confirm existing knowledge. This approach preserves the ability to retrieve the expert knowledge from the modified network.
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